porch boards, Stromsoe then fished the matches out of his pocket. The moths and mosquito hawks flapped against the porch lights and the waves swooshed to shore in the dark.
He sat down to think it over.
With his back to the door frame he brought up his knees and rested his face on his forearms.
The nail wounds in his body flared like struck matches. His ears rang. He could feel his glass eye moving against the skin of his arm, but the eye itself felt nothing. The matchbook fell from his hand. He asked God what to do and got no answer. He asked Hallie and Billy what to do and they told him not this – it was dangerous and stupid and wouldn’t help. Hallie’s argument that he couldn’t let his son be without a home made sense to him.
Stromsoe got up and went back inside and fell asleep on the living-room couch with the gas fumes strong around him and the waves breaking in the black middle distance.
He opened some windows before he crashed, a precaution that brought to him both cool night air and a sense of cowardice and shame.
The next morning he woke up with a tremendous hangover, for which he used hair of the dog and more Vicodin. After a shower and shave he dressed in pressed trousers and a crisp plaid shirt and called the neighborhood office of a national realty company.
Twenty minutes later a Realtor showed up, and by 11 A.M. Stromsoe had listed his home for sale. He offered the place furnished and as is. The Realtor’s suggested asking price was so high he could hardly believe it. The Realtor smiled fearfully as they shook hands out by his car. He said he’d sell the place within the week, though an escrow period would follow.
‘I’m sorry for what happened,’ he said. ‘Maybe a new home can be a new life.’
By noon Stromsoe and Susan were back in his courtyard, sitting on the picnic benches again. She’d brought a new cassette for the tape recorder and a handful of fresh wildflowers for the vase.
‘When I saw Hallie again it was ‘86,’ said Stromsoe. ‘We were twenty years old.’
Mike’s phone call the night before had convinced Stromsoe that he had to tell what Tavarez had done to Hallie, and how she had survived it. Tavarez could take her life but he couldn’t take her story. Or Billy’s. And El Jefe could not make Stromsoe kill himself, or diminish his memories, or make him burn down his house. Tavarez could not break his spirit.
‘I was at Cal State Fullerton. I was taking extra units, and judo at night, and lifting weights – anything to not think about her. Them.’
His words came fast now, Stromsoe feeling the momentum of doing the right thing.
‘Every once in a while I’d read about Tavarez in the papers – they loved the barrio-kid-conquers-Harvard story – and I’d think about her more. Then one night I just ran into them in a Laguna nightclub, the old Star. She was wearing a gold lamé dress with white and black beads worked into the brocade. Tight, cut low and backless, slit up the side. It was very beautiful. And her hair was done up kind of wild, and dyed lighter than it used to be. She came running over and wrapped her arms around me. I remember that she was wearing Opium perfume. I looked past her at Mike, who was watching us from a booth. He looked pleased. She pulled me over there and he invited me to sit with them but I didn’t.’
Stromsoe remembered how the strobe lights had beveled Hallie Jaynes’s lovely face into something exotic and unknowable.
It was so easy to see her now:
‘You look good,’ she had told him.
‘You do too.’
‘We miss you.’
We.
‘You’re the one who left.’
‘Oh, Matty, you’re much better off without us,’ she said with a bright smile. ‘Mike doesn’t know how to apologize. He doesn’t know what to say. I wish we could laugh again, you and me.’
She looked both radiant and famished. It was an appearance he would see a lot of in his generation as the decade wore on. Looking at her for the first time in almost two years, he realized that she had moved past him in ways that until now he hadn’t known existed.
‘She was different,’ Stromsoe said to Susan Doss. ‘So was Mike.’
He told Susan how Mike had gotten taller and filled out, grown his wavy black hair longer, wore a loose silk suit like the TV vice cops wore. His face had changed too, not just in breadth but in a new confidence. His sense of superiority was the first thing you saw – the quarter smile, the slow eyes, the lift of chin. He looked like an angel about to change sides.
‘They were there with three other couples,’ said Stromsoe. ‘The dudes were older than us by a notch or two – early thirties, good-looking, Latino, dressed expensive. Versace and Rolex. The women were all twentysomething knockout gringas – extra blond. I was there with some friends from school and we ended up sitting across the dance floor from Hallie and them. I could hardly take my eyes off her. You know how it is, that first love.’
‘Sure,’ said Susan. ‘Richie Alexander. I wrote poetry about him. But I won’t quote it for you, so don’t ask.’
Stromsoe smiled and nodded. Susan had freckles on her cheeks and a funny way of holding her pen, with her middle finger doing most of the work. Atop the garage, the crew commenced nailing the plywood to the roof frame and Stromsoe felt his nerves flicker.
He told Susan that on the drive home to his Fullerton apartment that night, he had lost his old faith that Hallie would come back to him someday. It was obvious to him that she and Tavarez were knocking on the door of a world in which Stromsoe had no interest. He had seen enough cocaine use at his high school and in his extended college circle to know the large sums of money attached. He had seen the white powder do ugly things to almost everyone he knew who used it. It made them pale and inward. Everything they did was for the high.
He didn’t tell Susan that when he had imagined Hallie becoming like that – an inversion of everything about her that he loved and lusted for – his heart had hardened against her. But it had broken a little too.
Stromsoe believed back then that people soon got what they deserved.
Now he did not.
Now, sixteen years later, Stromsoe understood that Hallie had become everything he had feared, and that Mike Tavarez had gotten much more good fortune than he had ever deserved.
Tavarez had demonstrated that coke was venom to body and soul, and that anyone who ignores this fact can make many, many millions of good Yankee dollars.
Hallie had demonstrated how right Mike was. She was his first customer.
When they finished the lunch Susan pushed the paper plates away to make room for her notebook. She had brought the plates with her today, and Stromsoe wondered if she had sensed his anger yesterday over Hallie’s dish.
‘I didn’t
